is the sun made of fire?

Answer 1

Not really. It's made of Hydrogen. Under enormous pressure, the hydrogen atoms fuse together to form Helium. The energy given off by that reaction is what warms us up. Eventually, all of the hydrogen will be used up, the sun will burn out, and Earth will fill with many dead, frozen bodies.

Answer 2

No; not in the conventional sense of fire that we are all familiar with. The Sun's "fire" is born of nuclear fusion, or the conversion of Hydrogen nuclei into Helium nuclei under the tremendous pressure and temperature existing deep within the Sun's core. This basic fusion process powers all true stars during the stable portions of their lifetimes. The chemical fires we experience in everyday life require the presence of atmospheric oxygen, and do give a fair amount of heat and light; but the process of nuclear fusion yields enormous amounts of energy with relatively much less fuel (those Hydrogen nuclei.) An average star like our Sun has enough Hydrogen fuel to "burn" with stable output for billions of years. The best bonfire a man can make will probably fizzle out, untended, in less than 2 days. The Sun is much older and much hotter than our common fire.

Answer 3

About 74% of the Sun's mass is hydrogen, 25% is helium, and the rest is made up of trace quantities of heavier elements.

Through most of the Sun's life, energy is produced by nuclear fusion. This process converts hydrogen into helium. The core is the only location in the Sun that produces an appreciable amount of heat via fusion: the rest of the star is heated by energy that is transferred outward from the core. All of the energy produced by fusion in the core must travel through many successive layers to the solar photosphere before it escapes into space as sunlight or kinetic energy of particles.

Answer 4

No it is not. Fire is a chemical reaction. The sun is a nuclear fusion reaction. The entire sun is in a plasma state, where all atoms are thoroughly ionized, unlike in a fire. To understand the difference, all the atoms in the sun are stripped of their electrons, so that the nuclei and electrons are roaming independently of each other. It takes incredibly high temperatures for that to happen, in the order of 10s of millions of degrees. In a fire, by contrast, the atoms are still intact, the electrons are with the nuclei. Temperatures are very low compared to the sun. A fire is like a block of ice to the sun.

Answer 5

No, not like the fire we're familiar with. Instead, the sun's heat and light comes from something called 'nuclear fusion,' which is the same thing as happens in a hydrogen bomb. Basically, the sun is an immense hydrogen bomb that's been 'exploding' for about 4.5-billion years, and will continue for at least another 4-billion years.

Answer 6

well the sun is made of gases that are in constant fission / fussion hence the rather large amount of energy coming from the sun. Fire is the excitation of atoms following the fire triangle: heat oxygen and fuel so no the sun is not made of fire

Answer 7

No.
Inasmuch as "fire" is defined as flames resulting from combustion (oxygen combining with something, in an exothermic reaction).

The sun is made mostly of hydrogen, with some helium and traces of just about everything else.

The light we get from the sun comes almost exclusively from its surface temperature (approx. 5500 C, or 10,000 F). Any object heated at that temperature will emit light with the same mixture of frequencies as we observe from the sun.

(e.g., the coil from a heater glows red when it gets hot enough, yet there is no fire -- unless you put a piece of paper against it)

What keeps the surface so warm is the energy generated at the core through the fusion of hydrogen into helium, at a temperature of somehwere around 13,600,000 C (over 24 million degrees F). The heat from the core takes lots of time (hundreds of thousands of years) to reach the surface.

Answer 8

The sun is made of hydrogen. As the hydrogen burns, it becomes helium, as the sun turns into helium it keeps changing elements as it gets heavier.

Eventually, it'll be a ball of Iron.

The sun is a ball of incandescent gas. A Thermal nuclear furnace
- They Might Be Giants

Answer 9

Not really. The Sun is made of plasma, a state of matter that is best described as an ionized gas. You don't see plasma much on earth except inside a fluorescent light tube. But some parts of a flame are also plasma, so there is a similarity.

Answer 10

It is made up of gases actually. The core is Hydrogen that fuses into Helium. 99% of its composition is Hydrogen and Helium.
A weird fact is that even though Oxygen is about .1% of the composition, and the mass of all the Oxygen is still less than 1% of the mass of the Sun, the mass of all the Oxygen is still about 3000x more massive than the planet Earth!